Genres

These tags are intended to place books within a specific genre. They are divided largely into two main groups, with literary classics as a third smaller group. The first group is Realistic Fiction, which includes any genres taking place in what we would consider to be the “real world” whether it occurs in the present day or in the past. The genres within Realistic Fiction include contemporary, mystery, historical, Westerns, thrillers, religious, and romance, with each genre containing multiple subgenres. The second main group of genres is Speculative Fiction, which refers to any works that have elements of the fantastic, whether that would be magic, highly advanced technology, supernatural creatures, or the paranormal, for example. The genres within Speculative Fiction are horror, paranormal, and science fiction and fantasy, which are then broken down into separate sections, one for science fiction and one for fantasy. Each of these genres then breaks down further into subgenres.

Due to the nature of some genres, there is some crossover between Speculative and Realistic fiction. Paranormal Romance, for example, is categorized under Romance with the Realistic Fiction hierarchy due to the main focus of the book being on the romance, with paranormal elements almost being considered secondary. Westerns and Religious Fiction also contain some crossover with Speculative genres, so if users find themselves unable to find the specific subgenre they’re looking for within either broad category, the subgenre they’re looking for may be located under another category.

Users are welcome to use as few or as many genre tags as they feel are appropriate and, as always, can create their own tags if they find none of the existing tags are suitable. We happily welcome feedback regarding what does and doesn’t work within these categories, suggestions for improvement, or any other comments users may have.

Tropes

Tropes is one of the most fluid and open categories of tags. In essence, a fictional trope is some quality—e.g. plot beat, relationship dynamic, character quality, theme—that is distinct and identifiable across multiple texts or other pieces of media. “Found family”, “fake dating”, and “alien first content” could all be considered tropes, but the possibilities are essentially endless. This is one of the categories with a more minimal starting vocabulary. We hope users will add the tropes that they personally identify and look for in books!

Character Tags

Character traits are tricky! We’ll break down the individual subcategories as they currently stand. For character tags in particular, we encourage you to contact us through https://fictionfilters.wpengine.com/contact-us/ if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions about inclusions and language. We would be happy to welcome insight on what needs to be changed or to further elaborate on our thought process.

As a disclosure of positionality, the team member who primarily worked on the “Disability and Related” and “Ethnicity and Race” sections 1. has significant physical disabilities (primarily mobility–uses canes and occasionally wheelchairs and scooters), a learning/coordination/processing disability, and has diagnosed mental illness and 2. is American, is primarily of European descent, and fully passes as white though her grandfather was Black.

Age We broke up ages into rough groups (e.g. child, teen, early adult) and then by decades. There are also some outliers, such as “Ageless or immortal characters”.

Career or Calling If a character has a job, sacred duty, character class, or hobby that’s particularly relevant to the story, it goes here.

Character Traits/Types Character archetypes, prominent personality qualities, etc. There’s decent overlap between these tags and the Tropes section, so listen to your heart with regards to what should go where.

Disability and Related There is passionate disagreement among different individuals and communities about what constitutes as a “disability” (e.g. deafness, mental illness). With respect to the fuzzy boundaries and the right for people to self-identify as they like, we wanted to expand to a broader umbrella; “Disability and Related” was our arguably uninspired solution. Within this umbrella, the tags are largely non-hierarchical, as there is also inconsistency and disagreement about what is included in subcategories such as “cognitive disabilities”, “neurodivergence”, and “learning disabilities”. We used a mixture of person-first and identity-first language, trying to use both best practices for broad community preferences and what would make the most easily understandable and searchable tags. The National Center on Disability and Journalism’s “Disability Language Style Guide” (https://ncdj.org/style-guide/) was an invaluable resource. There are endless tags that could be in this category, so we tried to represent one to a few identities each from a wide variety of areas, and we readily welcome tag additions to fill out the gaps.

Ethnicity and Race Because the definitions and boundaries of race vary highly from place to place and culture to culture and nationality is insufficient in describing the specifics of cultural identity, we decided to primarily lean on the concept of ethnicity structured on a framework of commonly grouped regions (e.g. Latin America, East Asia, Micronesia) that gets more specific as you progress further down hierarchies. This is not a perfect solution, and we know it. We again welcome feedback and are happy to discuss the categorization as a whole, the language of individual tags, and other concerns.

A few things that might be particularly relevant to discuss:

1. The majority of the ethnicity/race tags are split into ‘straightforward’ identities (primarily characters who were born in and/or currently live in the traditional home region of their ethnic groups) and ‘diasporic’ identities (primarily characters who are descendants of—recent or distant—people who were born in the traditional home region of their ethnic groups and characters who are emigrants from these areas). We felt that both cultural realities were important to represent in our tags.

2. These tags in no way represent the entirety or even a majority of cultural identities. We have created a framework, often with one or two tags at what we perceive as the lowest level of the hierarchies. Because of the immense multitude of ethnic groups (even limiting it to region-based ethnicities), we are relying on users to fill out the gaps as they come up. As there are also often multiple ethnic groups within individual countries, we would welcome their addition as even narrower hierarchical subcategories.

4. We largely conflate white racial identity with being of European descent and Black racial identity with being of African descent. This is very generalizing, but we felt it necessary to include whiteness and Blackness in the tags as important character identities without entirely breaking from the region-based ethnicity framework.

5. Indigenous identities are also framed by regions that often fall along national and continental borders, which do not reflect the traditional demarcations (or lack thereof) of the ancestral homelands of these Indigenous communities. We tried to focus more on geographic landmasses and collections of islands rather than political regions and then narrow down to individual Nations, tribes, and other Indigenous cultural groups. Again, the lowest levels of all of the hierarchies are very spare. We encourage additions. And we tried to identify the preferred names and Romanization of Nations and groups, but it is not unlikely that we made mistakes, so please reach out if you have any corrections.

6. The term “Latine” was chosen over “Latino”, “Latino/a”, “Latin@”, and “Latinx” with the intentions of balancing gender inclusion and visual and oral readability.

Time Periods

This category refers to the time period in which a work takes place, and is purposefully designed to be applicable across a wide variety of cultures. A major issue that exists within Western cataloging is the tendency for works to only be considered from a eurocentric stance, thus leading to imbalances in how non-Western cultures are represented within library catalogs. Our tags within this category were heavily borrowed from a 2021 fall quarter group project from students in the class LIS 536: Metadata for Interactive Media. It was originally developed for the UW’s Game Research Group (GAMER) Video Game Metadata Schema (VGMS) to be used in cataloging video games and other types of interactive media, but largely translates well for the classification of time periods within books.

These tags are kept purposefully broad in order to apply to many different cultures. Rather than using terminology relating to historical time periods, these categories focus on the technology level existing at the time in which the work takes place. A work taking place in Victorian England, for example, would be tagged as “Industrial Age”, while a work taking place during the Islamic Golden Age would be tagged with “Gunpowder Age”. We have provided definitions and guidelines for applying these categories on the website and users can refer to these definitions as needed.

Places

The tags for the places aspect of a work’s setting include real-world geographical locations, imagined-world characteristics, environmental characteristics, and general places. The geographical locations are organized by continent, and then regions within those continents. Included within this category are specific countries, states, and major cities. The imagined world characteristics include tags such as Alternate Earth, Imagined World, Outer Space, and Secondary World, which is further divided into tags such as Fae World, Fairytale World, and Real-World Inspired, among others. The environmental characteristics are to be used to describe what the environment is like and includes options such as Abandoned, Digital, Scientific, Educational, and Mountains. The last group, general places, is meant to describe the type of setting, for example High School, Beach, Forest, or Space Station.

These tags were also heavily borrowed from the LIS 536 student group project, originally meant to be used for the UW’s GAMER VGMS, but also translates well to cataloging book settings. Users can apply whichever tags are most appropriate to the work being tagged, and can use tags from any category that they think best describes the places in the work. Users can also create their own tags if the existing vocabulary does not meet their needs.

Ratings

These tag categories cover violence, sex and language. Each work gets only one statement for each category. The intention is to give readers a general idea of what to expect from a story without including specific actions, events or spoilers. Initially, each section had either a numbered scale or an initialism to denote each rating level, however in the transfer from our draft document to the website we found that we were constantly having to check each rating’s description when we wanted to fill in those tags. In the end, we decided to have a short but descriptive sentence describing each rating level so users wouldn’t have to work to use the system.

• Violence: This scale covers both the frequency of the violence and whether or not it is life threatening. Graphic violence is denoted via a + next to each level. 
• Sex: Our intention was to describe the circumstances under which the readers would encounter sexual content without ascribing any value or moral judgement onto any particular sex act. Though the scale includes phrases like “Youth” and “Teen,” it’s not intended to be a parents’ guide; we wanted to make sure to provide a rating system that was somewhat familiar to users by using labels for other common rating systems.
• Language: This scale is for general profanity. Slurs/pejoratives are intended to be denoted in the content warnings. Admittedly, the five us us weren’t very invested in this section and consequently didn’t have a lot of ideas for it. Our TA also reminded us that standards for profanity could differ greatly depending on region, culture, community, etc. With all this in mind, the Language ratings are left deliberately vague to account for that subjectivity.

Content Warnings

These tags are for specific instances in a story that readers might want to be forewarned about. Content warnings are more personal than ratings, and there is no limit to the number of content warnings tags that can be added. Our initial list of content warnings was based on the warnings listed on The StoryGraph and booktriggerwarnings.com. We didn’t include everything we found on those lists here on the website. Our thought was that users would supply those with each book that they tagged.

Endings

This section was originally created with romance readers in mind. For those unfamiliar, in order for a book to be marketed as a romance, it has to have a “Happily Ever After” (HEA) or “Happily For Now” (HFN) ending.  It’s also not uncommon for readers and writers of fanfiction to include tags that specify the type of ending their story has (e.g. “Open ending” or “Bittersweet ending”), so as we developed our core vocabulary, we decided to add other types of endings as well.

Appeals

In professional readers’ advisory work, there is broad discussion of the importance of identifying the potential appeals a book might have for a reader, rather than solely focusing on genre, subject, or synopsis. Joyce Saricks outlines six appeal categories in Readers’ Advisory Service in the Public Library (2004) and The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction, 3rd ed. (2018): pacing, character, tone, story, setting, and writing. Novelist, an organization and online readers’ advisory tool, also utilizes six: character, illustration, pacing, story, tone, and writing. We did not specifically use either of these frameworks for our appeal tags, but both, as well as The Storygraph, were inspiration. We’ve kept this category fairly spare with the hopes that users will create tags that suit the appeals they are most interested in. We are ready to accommodate changes in phrasing and hierarchy categories.